Arafat tour excludes Jenin

Published 9:00 pm Monday, May 13, 2002

Associated Press

JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank – Making his first trip in six months, Yasser Arafat on Monday toured West Bank cities battered by the Israeli military, but drew relatively small crowds in a sign of growing dissatisfaction with the Palestinian leadership.

Arafat skipped his most widely anticipated stop – the devastated Jenin refugee camp – pulling back at the last moment when aides feared he would be heckled in the stronghold for Islamic militants.

With aides holding both his arms, the Palestinian leader stepped gingerly onto the rubble on the edge of the camp, but turned and departed without approaching the makeshift stage or the 3,000 residents awaiting him.

“I’m very angry and very disappointed because Arafat did not visit the camp,” said 43-year-old Mohammed Abu Ghalyoun. “He didn’t talk to normal people, he didn’t want to meet the people who lost their sons … . If he isn’t interested in us, we are not interested in him.”

Until Monday, Arafat had not left the West Bank city of Ramallah for six months, and much of that time he faced Israeli travel restrictions.

“All the people in the camp supported Arafat when he was under the siege in his compound in Ramallah,” said Mohammed Damaj, a 34-year-old resident of the refugee camp and an activist in Arafat’s Fatah movement. Damaj said some Palestinians were disappointed Arafat did not press harder for a U.N. inquiry into the fighting at Jenin, which was scrapped when Israel resisted.

“Arafat was silent about that – the people in the camp felt that Arafat sacrificed them for his personal interests,” Damaj said.

Palestinian leaders initially claimed hundreds were killed in the Jenin camp in what they described as a massacre by Israeli troops. Israel calls the Palestinian claims wild exaggerations, saying about 50 Palestinians were killed, most of them fighters. International human rights groups have accused the Israeli military of abuses, but said there was no evidence of a massacre in Jenin.

In his other West Bank stops Monday, Arafat visited Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. Arafat walked through the basilica and descended a few steps into Jesus’ traditional birth grotto. “This place will be always and forever inside our hearts, minds and beliefs,” he said.

In Arafat’s final stop in Nablus, he received a warm greeting from 300 people who chanted, “We sacrifice our blood and our soul for Arafat.”

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